Tallinn is the first of my former soviet countries that I will visit on this trip and I would say it's a great place! I took the ferry here from Helsinki Finland and it cost about 23 euros. It was a 3 hour boat ride and the ferry was completely full. There was over 1,000 passengers on it. I walked down from the port for about 500 KM and ran into the old town Tallinn and entered at Fat Margaret's Tower. I don’t know why they call it this. It is simply an entrance to the old town. I immediately fell in love with this city. It’s designed around the 1800s. I felt like I was walking the same streets as the knights did way back when. It was amazing! Half of the old town is surrounded by brick walls that once guarded the city. The walls are roughly 30 feet high. There is a way to walk on the top of the walls, but I couldn’t find how to get up there. All the streets within the old town are either brick or rock. The doors or all the restaurants and shops in the town have kept their taste as they are still old

. One restaurant went straight into the city walls and was inside the rock. There are a lot of bars and outdoor restaurants on the sides of the streets. Many of them have candles on the tables along flowers and umbrellas in case it rained. It was just an amazing feeling getting lost in time. The town square was a big open area about the size of a football field surround by restaurants that looked into the giant courtyard. I took a walk outside of the city and ended up on a hill where there was a lookout of the old town and also Alexander Nevsky cathedral. The cathedral was modeled after the Kremlin in Moscow, but didn’t have all the colors and is probably much smaller. It was also very impressive. There are still a lot of signs of the Soviets here. The churches have the Russian symbols on top of them and I also saw it in a few more places. I don’t think there is much Russian’s here now, but what they left behind at the collapse of the Soviet Union is still here. At least some of it. I have slowly watched things change and it’s been interesting. Starting from nearly the north pole, it was quite cold there and it has slowly got warmer. It’s still cold here, but slowly getting warmer. The price of things has got a lot cheaper. It was very expensive in Norway, Finland was somewhat affordable, now here in Estonia, it’s very cheap compared to the rest of Europe. I did also get a chance to walk around new town. I walked all the way up and down the main street going to the Chinese embassy. I was hoping to get a visa for the rest of my trip, but was unsuccessful. They told me I have to get the visa in USA. I'm not sure what I will do now. New town is basically filled with more shopping centers and commercial districts where people work. It's not so exciting. I jsut saw a movie and went to a shopping center there and got some food.